8 choses que tu peux lire en français
A1 French listening practice · French · Curated for beginners
What does “bande dessinée” (BD) mean in French?
Une bande dessinée is a comic book, and the name is completely literal: une bande is a strip and dessinée means drawn. In speech it is usually shortened to une BD, said “bay-day”. In French bookshops, BDs are often treated as a major category in their own right, with their own section, and Astérix and Tintin sit there as literature.
French-language comics are widely called le neuvième art, the ninth art — a label pushed in the mid-1960s by critics and by the Journal de Spirou to argue that comics belonged alongside cinema. The tradition is Franco-Belgian: Hergé and Spirou are Belgian, and the field’s biggest festival is held in Angoulême. A single volume is un album; the plural is des BD or des BDs.